Life is just a bowl of cherries

An Austrian painter, sculptor and printmaker, Kiki Kogelnik moved to New York in 1962 where she joined a close-knit group of artists working in the city at the time. One of these artists was American abstractionist Sam Francis, who introduced Kogelnik to Wallasse Ting, an American-Chinese artist and poet known for his fluorescent colored paintings of cats, erotic nudes, and flowers. Francis helped published Ting’s One Cent Lifein 1964, a portfolio combining Ting’s poetry with works from Kogelnik and other artists of the time. Beyond the publishing of Ting’s portfolio, the friendship between Kogelnik and Ting flourished, as Ting became close to Kogelnik’s husband, George Schwarz, whom she married in 1967. Life is a bowl of Cherries,featured in this photograph, was hung in the hallway of their apartment at 330 Lafayette Street, which they moved into in 1978 and where it remained until George's passing in 2016.